Tell me what's the matter...

Why is it that fictional characters seem to be budding psychologists/psychiatrists who not only seem to have incredibly insight into others' troubles and motives, and not only are correct, but can also wax eloquently about it at the drop of a hat?

Two works that brought this to my attention were 1) House and 2) Fruits Basket.

1) House: Everyone seems to be so insightful in this series. I mean, it's like every patient House has ever treated seems to have some psychological truth to discover about him. Seriously, it gets distracting. Sure, part of compelling story and character development is having characters confront their flaws and whatnot, but sometimes the audience can figure it out for themselves, people.

Now, to be sure, I love the show and its writing, but sometimes people don't reach epiphanies about others, you know? Or they don't tell them about it, you know? Sometimes just a change in behavior is proof enough of a revelation. Show, not tell, peeps. It's a pretty basic rule.

2) Fruits Basket: Not quite as bad about characters preaching to one another, but that's mainly because we have the benefit of inner dialogue here. In fact, the series handles it fairly well with the use of inner dialogue. It does seems like Touhru has a unearthly amount of insight, but she's not always telling other characters about their own problems. She's usually just thinking it to herself.

Like I said, not generally as bad, but there are times in both series (mostly House, but both have their moments) that it feels like they can't let the reader/watcher figure out a character's woes and what they need to do to be fixed on their own. It's like the audience must be told everything rather than drawing their own conclusions.

Fruits Basket is actually really good about keeping even its ridiculous amounts of exposition about character's mental issues rather low-key (maybe just the show's context makes it possible?). I guess the reason it strikes me as an example is in contrast to House. Seriously, I enjoy probing Greg's psyche as much as the writer, but I do like to be able to realize some things for myself. The character is complex enough and Hugh Laurie is competent enough of an actor (understatement, much?) that we can just watch him and undertand struggles and growth. We don't need everything verbally spelled out for us.

Yeah, this would be an example of when "show, don't tell" should be taken as law occasionally.

Ah, nostalgia...

Nowadays, I tend to prefer fantasy and science fiction, but still enjoy other genres. However, as a little kid, I was a strict fantasy buff. There was little that could persuade me to read anything that didn't involve some kind of magic (unless it had horses... I read a lot of horse books). One of my favorite series was The Unicorn Chronicles by Bruce Coville.

Looking back now, it was a fairly generic story about a girl that is drawn into a magic land, but I loved it then and it still resides in a fond place in my heart, padded heavily with nostalgia. However, even as a kid, there were two things that drove me crazy about the Chronicles.

1) When I first found and fell in love with the series, there were only two published and that was all that had been out for several years even when I picked it up.

I waited impatiently for many years before nearly giving up on the series, only to have the third and fourth books come out very recently. Cue geek out on my part and a feeling of betrayal. It's like it was waiting for me to forget about it before it would rear up again. I beat it in terms of patience, but now that I am older, I am not able to view the new books with as much pleasure as I did the old ones. It feels rather sad actually.

2) Even as a kid, reading through them time after time and considering them the bee's knees, similarities between the Chronicles and other series were sometimes quite obvious. The first two remain mostly untarnished under the protection of my nostalgia goggles, but it was really glaring in to my older self in the recently-read third book (including, but not limited to, a scene of going underground with goblin-like creatures, seemingly taken straight out of The Hobbit.)

Yet, all in all, I still view them with a great deal of happy nostalgia. It was these books on tape that introduced me to the wonders of a full-cast recording (two words: Eh-pick!). I still luffs them, despite all their flaws.  Those flaws just happen to drive me batty.

...in SPACE!

Meme. (I use TV Tropes as a reference far too often.)

Yeah, apparently it's pronounced "meem", though I always pronounced it "mem" (with a short 'e'). The thought behind it is "gene" and "genetic" (since it is "meme" and "memetic"). But I still call it "mem". It just looks better to me.

Attention span? What attention span?

So, I had a topic I was super excited about talking about... and I forgot it. Yeah... I'm kind of annoyed with myself for not writing it down before I forgot it.

I'm feeling much better today and as such, my brain is jumping from one topic to another faster than you can say... Well, I'm not sure what you could say that would be comparable to how fast my mind is jumping from one topic to another. And the worst part is that every new thing my brain settles on for however fractional a second, I want to talk about it, but then my mind is skipping ahead of my mouth again. No attention span whatso-- ooh, a butterfly...

Chance or theft...

I'm sick. Been sick for a while and will probably be sick for a while yet. I hate colds. And ear infections. I hate those too.

Anyway, while sick, I was watching Escaflowne the movie after having finished the series recently. Escaflowne was actually the first anime movie I ever watched, methinks, quite a few years ago. I recently watched the series to see what exactly it was that I remembered and even ended up buying one of the soundtracks for the series and the movie soundtrack. The movie soundtrack especially is fantastic and I found out that the same composer who did the music for the series and movie also wrote the music for "Cowboy Bebop", which I am currently watching and which I have heard rave reviews about for its music. Yes indeed.

While watching the movie with my soundtrack in mind, I noticed something. One of the songs (track 23 - Final Vision) sounds a lot like the music from Nausicaa and a bit from Castle in the Sky. And it actually plays while the floating fortress disintegrates, playing similar to the music when the castle collapses in Castle in the Sky. Coinkydink? Inspiration? It was interesting.

Pass me the BrainBleach...

TV Tropes is ruining my life.

So... I was reading entries and whatnot and I came across fans' suggestions that Jack Sparrow is bisexual and that he and Beckett may have... history of some sort.

I watched POTC3 again, paying special attention to all the scenes where Jack and Beckett interact, or have references made to one another in their presence.

O_O

Disney, how could you?  *scarred*

The Dark Knight does not approve...

I'm trying to write a scholarly paper here. I am doing my research, citing my sources, trying to draw logical conclusions.

The problem: there seems to be a great lack of scholarly sources on Batman.

Seriously, I'm trying to write a paper about some of the great literary creators and creations of detective fiction within the past few centuries. What are the first names that you think of when I say "detective"?

Edgar Allan Poe, Sherlock Holmes and Batman of course!

Well, maybe not, but that is what I am aiming for: to instill those names into that genre so strongly that any time anyone ever says "detective" again, you'll think of a pipe-smoking raven in a bat-cape.

But it is as if the scholarly community is against me as I do last-minute research (I procrastinated horribly on this project and I take full blame for it), since it seems as though no one believes in writing serious scholarly articles on the deep themes of Batman and his literary traditions. Gah...